The Himalayas as a prehistoric corridor for the peopling of E and SE Asia

Abstract

Recent phylogeographic studies (Stewart and Stringer, 2012; Parducci et al., 2012) have suggested that southern Tibet and the southeastern Himalayas could have been an ice age refuge for various organisms. The prevalence of private haplotypes restricted to single populations that could not all have evolved locally in just 14,000 years appears to reflect the fragmentation of previously more widespread haplotypes before their isolation in refugia on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas during the LGM. The use of private haplotypes of scattered juniper groves (Opgenoorth et al., 2010) and endemic edaphous beetles (Schmidt et al., 2011) as a proxy for moderately lower LGM summer temperatures in southern Tibet is corroborated by studies of endemic flowering plants of the alpine steppe (Miehe et al., 2011 ), the Tibetan Plateau pika (Ci et al., 2009) and Aconitum (L. Wang et al., 2009).